Sociology for Social People and Psychology for the Psyched

Sociology and psychology sometimes get lumped together under the category of "social sciences," and are left to remain there without further distinction. Generally, it's known that sociology and psychology have something to do with studying people in a somewhat scientific way. This is not a false assumption, but it fails to acknowledge the two sciences as disciplines in their own right. Sociology and psychology are related and often coincide, but they have different definitions. Sociology is the study of human social groups and how they interact with each other, while psychology is basically the study of human mind and behavior. It's no wonder that sociology and psychology intersect-obviously, the way people think and act influences the way they group together and form societies. In turn, the motivation that society instills in people influences their thoughts and actions. Sociology often deals with issues of race, economics and culture. Inevitably, sociology ends up paying a lot of attention to how unfair the world is, and it explains how people can see things completely different depending on what country they're in. In the nature versus nurture debate, sociology puts its stake in nurture. Sociologists tend to see a lot of things in life as socially constructed. For example, many sociologists would take the position that race and gender technically don't exist. Sociology points to the fact that people share practically 99.9% of their DNA and that in some societies, it's women who are considered strong and aggressive. All of the characteristics, actions and thoughts of human beings are simply by-products of culture.On the other hand, psychology would lean a little more towards nature than sociology does, paying attention to what's going on inside of us as well as outside. Psychology has its roots in more abstract spiritual notions, but today it takes the physical world into account. Psychology examines our biological processes, and how they might influence the thoughts we have and the choices we make-psychology studies the brain as well as the mind. When people think of psychology, they tend to think of shrinks and psychoanalysis. In reality, counseling psychology is just one aspect of psychology as a whole. There are other fields such as biological psychology, clinical psychology, developmental psychology and social/personality psychology-human behavior and thinking, when you think about it, practically all of life is psychological. There are some critics who would dispute the classification of sociology and psychology as sciences, psychology in particular. People can make difficult and sometimes questionable participants in scientific research. How can you quantitatively measure people and psychological processes you can't see? Sociology has it a little easier than psychology in this department, since environmental factors are easier to study than internal ones. Is it really possible to measure factors like thoughts and emotions? Granted, psychology is much more scientific than it used to be when it first started out, but it still receives some flak for being a "pseudo-science."Whether you choose to study sociology or psychology, you're bound to run into some of the same concepts, just with different focuses. Even though they can sometimes represent opposing sides of the nature versus nurture debate, science is coming to realize that both nature and nurture are important. Sociology and psychology both have something to contribute to human knowledge, and therefore they're worth distinguishing and studying.